Many different dental implant designs have been proposed and applied with varying degrees of success.
Submergible blade and screw-type implants have been shown to be the most popular form of dental implant in recent times. This type of implant works on the principle of "osseointegration", a term coined by Dr. Per-Ingvar Branemark of Sweden. Osseointegration is a process wherein bone grows towards the implant device. It is desired to have the bone grow through holes and vents in the implant, so that the implant becomes structurally integral with the jaw, thus stabilizing the implant.
One of the drawbacks to the above process (osteointegration) is that it requires many months to achieve the necessary bone growth, with no control or predictable results. Therefore, the doctor and patient cannot put the new teeth into immediate function, but rather must wait until nature decides to cooperate.
Another drawback of these devices is that they distribute uncontrolled biting forces in such a way that it is not always predictable whether enough support for masticatory forces will be provided by the implant to prevent failure.
More often than not poor bone physiology and heavy masticatory forces cause this implant to fail.
Screw-type implants have also been applied with varying success. This type of dental implant is designed to take an immediate hold within the jaw bone by the use of small sharp-pointed threads. The surface design of these threads contacts bone surface where possible, thus providing varying degrees of support due to the lack of physiologic integrity of bone following tooth extraction.
Unfortunately, however, the sharp-bladed threads often traumatize the bone, putting too much pressure on bone surfaces.
Therefore, this type of implant often cause necrosis of the bone tissue, and subsequent failure of the implant under masticatory loading, due to minimum structural support areas of the implant.
The present invention is based on the discovered osteocompression principle that proper bone physiology and masticatory support is achievable only by careful control of the osteocompressive forces exerted between the implant surface and the surrounding bone tissue of the jaw.
Controllable osteocompression is accomplished by increasing the surface area of implant support through novel geometric re-design of the conventional screws' over-all dimensions.